The ubiquity of personal mobile computing devices (“mobile devices”) presents many opportunities for context-based interaction with users. Unfortunately, various technical hurdles limit the degree to which various systems can provide this contextual functionality. For example, Quick Response (QR) and bar codes require the user to actively capture images within a short distance of an object, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags may similarly require close proximity, and exclusively Global Positioning System (GPS)-based applications may be difficult to integrate with object placement so that the user device and object correspondence may be readily determined. Although Bluetooth® systems may provide an appropriate range and data transfer, standing alone, they often fail to provide the secondary functionality necessary to implement various context-sensitive applications.
In addition, Bluetooth® system functionality rarely addresses all the business needs of various users. For example, while the omnidirectional emission of beacon messages to recipients may facilitate simple notification schemes, business owners may desire more specific control over how messages are received. Business owners may desire that only certain users receive messages under certain conditions and that beacon devices operate efficiently within a larger system consolidating information. Furthermore, communications exclusively in the wireless medium limit the scope of information that can be conveyed between a beacon device and a user, as well as between beacon devices. Existing protocols may not enable a beacon device distributor to coordinate and/or verify the appropriate installation of beacon devices.
While the flow and sequence diagrams presented herein show an organization designed to make them more comprehensible by a human reader, those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from what is shown, in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.